Rocks seem to invite all sorts of thoughtless interactions. People like to kick rocks that seem out of place or skim flat stones on the water. On Baker Beach in San Francisco, stones tend to be deposited on the beach in small rocky patches, due to the movement of the current. When I first arrived at the beach, a group of people had made a small tower of balanced stones by their beach towel (I took the picture on the way back after they had left the beach). The flat shape of these stones afforded easy stacking. I would imagine that the smooth feeling of the stones originally led someone to pick a few up and when they decided to put them down, it seemed natural and intuitive to organize them together in a tower.
My group's project deals with creating markers on maps through gestures from a shoe outfitted with sensors. Placing markers is a universal and often unconscious gesture. The stones provided a marker that differentiated between that particular group's towel and the other towels on the beach. Perhaps they even helped to weigh the towels down in the light breeze. People like to interact with the environment, often by thoughtlessly moving and rearranging things. Leaving personalized tags, whether through rock towers or digital data from shoes, is one such way to leave a mark.
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